Review: ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ by Unsuk Chin, Told With Restraint

LOS ANGELES — Beginning with a subterranean, almost inaudible rumble, Unsuk Chin’s “Alice in Wonderland” isn’t quite the madcap spectacle you might expect from an opera based on Lewis Carroll’s novel. While there is ample zaniness in the two hours of music that follow, it is the score’s sober core that keeps the opera’s mood pleasurably disconcerting.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s two-performance run of “Alice” last weekend, directed and designed by the British theater artist Netia Jones, did not stint on the opera’s surreal trappings but stayed true to that fundamental sobriety. While the work’s first production, in Munich in 2007, had the thick crayon lines and circus tints of a child’s coloring book, Ms. Jones’s staging, seen on Friday, was in wry, pinpoint ink. It was dominated by projections on an askew screen, making ample use of Ralph Steadman’s trippy, grotesque black-and-white “Alice” illustrations from the 1970s.

Not that the production was colorless. Far from it, starting with Alice’s distinctive baby-blue dress and extending to a chorus of children dressed as pink mice. But amid the parade of bizarre episodes, the overall impression was one of clarity, with a stage floor covered in a chessboard pattern and Susanna Malkki conducting the Philharmonic with cool, confident lucidity.

The kaleidoscopic colors of Ms. Chin’s score, with a brilliantly enigmatic libretto by the playwright David Henry Hwang, stood out all the more starkly against these relatively restrained surroundings. She is a master of creative combinations. When the White Rabbit (Andrew Watts) rhapsodizes about a lost item of clothing — “What the world needs now,” he sings, “is love, sweet gloves” — Ms. Chin layers a somber orchestral rustle, a solo violin melody and a plaintive countertenor vocal line. For Alice’s scene with the hookah-smoking caterpillar (silent in this version), a bass clarinet plays a long solo that’s the jazzy, angular love child of “Rhapsody in Blue” and “The Rite of Spring.”

Image

Netia Jones’s set for the Los Angeles Philharmonic production of “Alice in Wonderland,” with Andrew Watts as the White Rabbit.CreditMathew Imaging

It makes sense for “Alice” to have come here. The work was originally commissioned by Los Angeles Opera, but its planned premiere about 10 years ago was canceled when the company had money problems. The Philharmonic, which has the resources to pull off a short run of a fairly extravagant production, has now stepped in, with the latest in its series of ambitious forays into contemporary opera. (Among other things, the orchestra presented Ms. Jones’s staging of Oliver Knussen’s “Where the Wild Things Are” in 2012.)

“Alice” largely proves itself to have been worth the West Coast’s wait. Its effects are frequently ingenious. The orchestra responds with waves of shuddering sound to a lullaby Alice sings to a baby who’s been changed into a pig, and the ensemble has an aquatic glimmer as Alice swims with a mouse. The vocal writing is distinctive without seeming awkward, with innocent-seeming lines for Alice (the clear yet warm-toned soprano Rachele Gilmore) and stratospheric, sinuous ones for the Cheshire Cat (the excellent soprano Marie Arnet).

Ms. Chin’s eclecticism sometimes takes the form of overt references to music history, as in a passage of harpsichord-accompanied recitative at the start of the fifth scene. The work made an unexpectedly good complement to John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles,” which played across the street at Los Angeles Opera through Sunday and is also a postmodern pastiche, albeit in a lyrically ingratiating American mode rather than Ms. Chin’s bristling European-style one.

In its juxtapositions of sharply contrasting moods, resourceful orchestration and sneering satire, “Alice” can recall, sometimes to a fault, the music of one of Ms. Chin’s teachers, Gyorgy Ligeti, and particularly his operatic masterpiece, “Le Grand Macabre.” Like that work, “Alice” can be more impressive in excerpt than in its entirety, with the score eventually blanching into tedium as the inventive energy of its early scenes wears off. But the Philharmonic gave it a sharp, stylish presentation. The production was remarkable not just for bringing a worthy opera back to Los Angeles but also because it was written by a female composer, led by a female conductor and staged by a female director and designer.

To add to this highly unusual confluence, on Sunday the orchestra performed with Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, its young assistant conductor, on the podium for Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. She lovingly brought out filigree details in “Petrushka” and gave a Beethoven of crispness and moderate tempos, its second-movement funeral march daringly creamy in its phrasing, unfolding as if dark fabric were being slowly pulled from the ensemble.

Weekends like this, dominated by female performers, provided a reminder that almost every orchestra and opera company has a ways to go to achieve gender equity, particularly in leadership roles. Lewis Carroll’s lost Alice is, if anything, desperately in need of female role models, and Los Angeles has them in spades.

Correction:

An opera review on Tuesday about a performance of “Alice in Wonderland” by the Los Angeles Philharmonic referred incorrectly to another performance by the orchestra. It was the second movement — not the third — of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 that the reviewer described as “a funeral march daringly creamy in its phrasing.”